The major theoretical and political problem of totalitarian rule is that it is difficult to create a mass movement against a totalitarian regime given severe repression of dissent. When totalitarian rule supplants democratic governance, resistance becomes most severely constrained, but also most necessary. In this context, non-violent forms of resistance, epitomised by the tactics of figures such as Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr, are quickly repressed, so opposition movements need to adopt other strategies. In other totalitarian contexts, such as Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, the café became an important resource for movements against the state. First of all, the café was a place to escape the loneliness of life under totalitarian rule (Bronner and Kellner 1982: 97) and allowed people to come together in a public space that was not subject to state surveillance and control (Kohn 2003: 16). In Italy, cooperative cafés were even more suited to the task of fomenting resistance against totalitarian rule in that they are both an economic tactic and sociopolitical space (Kohn 2003: 71). These types of cafés, like the Indian Coffee House at Connaught Place, for example, became autonomous zones that fostered resistance against the totalitarian state.

An autonomous zone is ‘a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself before the state can crush it’ (Bey 1985: 95). In other words, an autonomous zone creates an area which is separate from state and capital in which revolution and resistance is not only possible but also encouraged. Or as Saul Newman writes,